Aimee's journey through digital technologies and their uses!

Reflection

“Educators face a constant challenge of refining teaching and learning techniques to keep up with increasing demands and expectations of students…” (Howell, 2012).

Technology is always changing and being improved upon. I believe that it is the responsibility of educators to have a general understanding of the educational technology and software that is available so that they are able to apply them appropriately to classroom practices.

Creating a blog in the beginning seemed to be a reasonable straight-forward process. However, as I dove in and began learning about what was required of me, I became very daunted! I then began working through the assessment step-by-step and it all started to come together.

Through the course of the assessment, I used three programs to create my blog posts. These programs being WordPress, Sway and Nearpod. Before using these programs for assessment 2, I had not even heard of them, let alone attempted to use them.

Using these programs, I had to develop my skills in sourcing and uploading photos into a document and do some simple editing, make recordings and insert them into a presentation, customising a blog and also my academic writing.

As I was creating my “Sway” document especially, I began to envision how I would use this program in a lesson. I began to see that although this was possibly a program that was to involved for upper primary students to use individually, it would make a fantastic tool for small group learning projects with careful scaffolding used too move the students towards digital fluency.

“For teachers, there is unlimited potential to easily and quickly create striking content that can make learning fun.” (Thorp, 2015).

The above quote really sums up how I feel about “Sway” as a program. Without this assessment, I would not have had the opportunity to become acquainted with some fantastic new software and to build upon my learning and understanding on a very in depth topic.